I'd suggest setting the word "truth" aside, at least at first. You've given us a decision with two alternatives. There are reasons for and against each, and it's not clear that the reasons on either side have an edge. If , suppose, the case for imposing penalties was stronger overall, then we could say that that's what ought to happen, and we could even put this by saying it's true that penalties ought to be imposed. But saying that there are two different "truths" tends to confuse us.
Think about a less fraught case. You're trying to decide where to go on holiday and as it happens, there are two choices. If we want, we can model the decision-making process using the tools of what's called decision theory. There will be different considerations—say, expense, climate, quality of acomodations, sight-seeing possibilities... You could give each possibility a score on each dimension. You could also decide how much you care about expense, climate, etc. relative to one another. Putting all that information...

A nice question.
Suppose a painter paints a scene with a person in it. Apart from very special circumstances, we wouldn't take this to be a matter of the painter telling us that the event really happened and the person depicted was really there. It might be that a real person is depicted who really was in the place pictured. But that's not how paintings are ordinarily intended, and it's not how they're ordinarily understood. Calling the painting false because what it asks us to imagine never really happened would be a bit like saying that the Sherlock Holmes stories are false because there was never any such person as Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, a painter could use a painting as a way of conveying information intended to be factual. I take that to be the point of your example. And in many cases, some aspects of paintings are intended in just that way. Suppose a portrait depicts a blue-eyed person as having brown eyes. Depending on the larger story, this might be a genuine inaccuracy in the...

It is confusing, isn't it? What does it mean to say that there's no absolute truth? It certainly seems to mean that all truth is in one way or another relative. That, in turn, seems to mean that for any potential truth, there are different and conflicting standards, equally valid, and the claim at issue might be true relative to one of these standard and false relative to another. But if this is really how things go for any potential truth, then it seems to go for the claim that there is no absolute truth. In other words, it seems to imply that the claim "there is no absolute truth" is true by some valid standards and false by some other, equally valid standards. This seems to make for a kind of trouble without invoking absolute truth. If someone tells me that there is no absolute truth, I seem by their own lights to be perfectly justified in insisting that I adhere to a valid standard according to which their claim is false. Perhaps they'll shrug and live with that. But there are...

The tricky thing about this issue is to decide what the issue is. Some people seem to want to say that all facts are constructed, but I've never really understood what this is supposed to mean. Let me yank at a few threads and see if any of them are connected to the worry. Some facts depend on our conventions, institutions and so on. A well-worn example: I have a shiny round bit of metal in front of me. As a matter of fact, it's a quarter; it's worth $.25. That really is a fact, but it wouldn't be a fact if we didn't have certain practices, institutions and so on. In at least some sense of "constructed," it's a constructed fact. We also classify things in various ways. Some of those classifications grow out of our interests, beliefs and so on. Classifying music according to genre is relatively benign; classifying people according to the racial categories of apartheid-era South Africa or the antebellum American South is anything but benign. Sometimes we take our classifications to mark deep...

Let's start with an analogy and see how far it gets us. Suppose I consider a proposition about some distant place. Suppose I consider the proposition that the population of Woodstock, New Brunswick (my home town in Canada) is over 6,000. [To keep things simple, assume that I mean the population today, August 5 2007.] I'm contemplating this "here" in Washington DC. But it's a proposition about some other place -- "there," not "here." And now consider the question: "Does this proposition about Woodstock have to be true or false here in Washington?" The question seems a little odd. What the proposition asserts refers to a particular place, but the idea that the truth of the proposition is, as it were, tied to the place where it's being contemplated seems off. We might put it this way: the proposition picked out by my use of the sentence "Woodstock has a population over 6,000" is true if the population of Woodstock really is over 6,000 and false otherwise. Asking if the proposition is true ...